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Brett and Michelle Girtler were told just hours after their twin girls were born that they had a serious blood disease: amegakaryocytic thrombocytopenia. It’s a rare inherited condition that prevents blood from forming platelets needed for clotting, and it can eventually lead to leukemia.

For the first five years of their lives, Elizabeth and Kathryn were kept healthy with regular infusions of new platelets. But as the disease progressed, the Girtlers faced a difficult choice.

“Cure” is not often a word associated with diseases like leukemia, but in this case, it was possible. The girls would need bone marrow transplants, a harrowing experience for any patient and particularly for children.

Bone marrow is the factory for new blood cells and immune cells. In a transplant, bone marrow is wiped out with chemotherapy and sometimes radiation. Then healthy donor stem cells are fed into the bloodstream through an IV. The new cells find their way to the bone marrow, where they start making new, healthy cells.

But during the time new cells are being made , the patient is without an immune system and must be protected against infection. Both girls spent long periods in the hospital, and their parents said it was very hard to see them looking so ill.

But the bone marrow transplants worked, and today Elizabeth and Kathryn are healthy young girls once again.

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